Fun with PostgreSQL

During the Summer, when we were in Chicago, my server's hard drive died (quite literally the day we left to return to Chicago after two weeks at home). I run it out of my house, and there was no competent tech support with a key to the house. I ended up flying back down for a day to get the server going again, but in the process messed up a few things, including the ability to automatically download security patches.

This morning, I decided to fix that by upgrading the server's OS, then running the update service on the new OS. One small problem: turns out that using RPMs to install PostgreSQL (the database I use for, among other things, this blog) is a bad idea: the upgrade process requires you to dump the database under the old version, potentially hand edit the dump file without any instructions on how to do so (!!!), install the new version, then reimport your data. The RPM package does not dump the data before deinstalling the old version (!!!).

Fortunately, there are backups and other aids to fixing the resulting mess, but that's why comments were down all day. They're working now.